Q&A: Is the SR-22 carpool project worth the trouble?

Sitting in bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic on the westbound 22 between Goldenwest Street and the I-405 connector, drivers have plenty of time to watch the weeds growing between cones blocking an empty, perfectly good lane to their left, and to wonder: Why can’t we drive over there?

Late-night drivers forced off the freeway by detours around closed sections of I-405 have had plenty of time to wonder: Why is this happening? And will it ever end?

This miserable traffic has been part of commuters’ lives for four years as state and county transportation agencies upgrade the junction of the 22, I-405 and I-605, adding flyover carpool connectors to link existing carpool lanes on the three freeways.

The $277 million West County Connectors project is the second phase of the Garden Grove Freeway Improvement Project. The first phase of the project was completed in 2007 at a cost of about $500 million. It added improvements including a carpool lane in each direction of the 12-mile stretch of the 22 between the 55 and Valley View Street.

Transportation officials said they expect to finish the West County Connectors project by the end of the year – possibly as soon as Thanksgiving. So far, the project has cost about $232 million.

The Register sat down with Bill Gilchrist and Andrew Chuah, both Caltrans engineers overseeing the construction projects; Dennis Mak, a project manager with the Orange County Transportation Authority; and Niall Barrett, program manager for OCTA, to ask questions that have been on the minds of many commuters.

Q. Why is this taking so long?

DM: We have to maintain capacity (traffic flow) at all times, so the construction is staged. You notice a lot of work being done at night. Bridges can’t be done at the same time because people and emergency workers need alternate routes to get around. All of that requires coordination and timing.

Multiple bridges need to be torn down and reconstructed – for example, the Valley View Street and Seal Beach bridges – but you have to do that one bridge at a time, one side at a time, to maintain traffic flow, provide detours and disrupt the public as little as possible. If we could tear down both bridges at the same time, it would be much faster, but we can’t.

Q. Why does the 405 freeway have to be closed all night?

DM: It comes down to worker safety and access. We have trucks moving in and out and equipment, and there’s no safe way for them to move around while the freeway is open.

BG: You want to use the existing freeway to stage your equipment to construct the overhead bridges. A lot of it is being done in the middle of the freeway, so there isn’t much room to stage construction equipment to build these large overhead structures. Besides building the bridges, we have to re-stripe the freeway, construct drainage systems and install overhead lights.

AC: We can’t have anything suspended over the freeway while there’s live traffic, so we can’t use cranes or move beams while people are driving around.

DM: (Closing the freeway for construction) is done at night because of the significantly lower traffic volume. We appreciate the patience of those drivers.

Q. Why did you funnel westbound SR-22 down to two lanes to transition to the 405, causing miles of backup, when there is a wide, coned-off lane available?

AC: It’s coned off now for safety, so that you’re not traveling at 65 mph to the construction site, and then having to brake or merge into traffic.

Q. The environmental documents for this project say that by 2020 only about 700 drivers an hour will use the flyover lanes in the morning rush (and 1,150 per hour in the evening rush). The document also says anything less than 800 cars an hour in carpool lanes creates “empty lane syndrome perception.” Why are we spending $277 million for nearly-empty flyover ramps?

NB: I think that’s the key word there, “perception.” As people move at faster speeds, we get a lot more cars through the system. So it’s a perception; it’s not in fact reality. This project is certainly justified by numbers that go anywhere close to 1,200 (vehicles per hour in carpool lanes), and again it reduces all that merging and weaving (where gaps in carpool lanes force drivers into general purpose lanes), which helps everybody. So I think that’s all it is, a perception.

Also, all HOV (carpool) traffic projections were assumed to be 3+ (people per vehicle), but given that the existing occupancy requirement for HOV lanes in Orange County is currently 2+ (people), many more vehicles than the report noted will be able to use these HOV lanes, resulting in even greater numbers of vehicles utilizing and benefiting from the HOV system.

Q.The environmental document also projects that by 2020 time spent commuting along the 12-mile corridor would decrease less than 1 percent, and average speed would increase just 3 percent compared to projected speed and commute times without any improvements. Is this whole project just a boondoggle to capture federal funds?

NB: No. If every car out there is saving one to two minutes in the general purpose lane, and the HOV (carpool) drivers are saving up to five minutes, that’s a lot of time saved every day for everybody. You add that up over a day or over a year, that’s a lot of time. Again, it comes down to perception: It doesn’t seem like a lot, but the time saved each day, in each direction (multiplied by) number of cars and then multiplied by 52 weeks, everybody is saving a lot of time.

If you do the math on this project, you’re talking about 5.7 million hours per year of total time saved. So you’re really getting bang for your buck.

And this is just one piece of our overall freeway system, so if we can save a few minutes per driver with every project, it’s going to add up to a noticeable difference.